Realities......

Some time ago, somebody took a cab . As chance would have it, the driver was also born in 1966, in Tehran. Iran’s revolution erupted when he was 13. At the age of 20, he immigrated to Israel, mainly because he did not want to serve in the Iranian army during the Iran-Iraq war. His parents remained there. About two years ago, his father came to Israel for six months. By fall, at the end of his visit, he decided that Tehran suits him better and returned to Iran. The driver described an Iranian reality unlike what most people imagine. Months of unrest, night time curfews and troubles with the family store preceded the Islamic Revolution, but calm and order immediately followed it. Numerous restrictions on economic life were lifted; Jews won state protection; and the store came back to life and prospered. Every Thursday a party was held in the city. Many young men and women would come to a private, spacious private home. A special room was set aside for all the veils and Chadors. The young people would remove their religious costumes as raucous contemporary music played; forbidden alcohol and sex filled the house….other words life went/goes on like everywhere else in the world.

On the other hand, in Israel the surrounding reality is governed by completely different rules that alter the perception of reality from the very beginning, Israel abandoned the promises in its Declaration of Independence regarding "complete equality of rights, irrespective of religion, race or sex." From the beginning, Israel has (for example ) banned marriage between a Jew and a non-Jew in a manner reminiscent of the laws of that other country (Iran). From the beginning, a person who lacks a private car has been prevented from traveling on the weekly day of "vacation." For 70 percent of Israel's existence, or almost 44 long years, there have been large swathes of land in which Jews are citizens, but not their non-Jewish neighbor. Jerusalem is also a city in which, on public transport, men and women are often forbidden from riding in the same part of the bus. And a majority of the country's Jewish first-graders receive a state-subsidized religious or ultra-Orthodox education that deems it self-evident that non-Jews are not human beings, and must never be allowed to be citizens, only subjects. This is true even in Jerusalem, the state's "united" capital.

Reality is, the Israeli foreign minister ascends the world stage and, in the name of his state “Israel”, announces his intention to "transfer" those who are not of the correct ethnic origins out of their citizenship. In reality, a prime minister who has been elected twice took office for the first time just seven months after having led incendiary demonstrations in which participants chanted "with blood and fire, we'll expel Rabin." These demonstrations led to Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin's assassination. In reality, pogroms are conducted, with the aim of ethnically cleansing the city. In reality, a ban on selling or renting apartments to those who are not of the Jewish race is promoted by senior public officials - from the leader of a major party that controls the Interior Ministry, Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, who has issued religious rulings to this effect, to the chief rabbi of Safed, Rabbi Shmuel Eliyahu. That is the nature of the human spirit: In order to live, man is equipped with ample powers of repression. It is also always within our power, therefore, as we merrily celebrate life, to show a bit of concern for the possibility of a coming apocalypse - which in fact already arrived long since.

Make your own thoughts and ask people who should know like the author of the above article "Sefi Rachlevsky".